Red Shadow Page 9

  It was an odd request but Misha didn’t mind. Maybe she felt she didn’t want to part company from him quite yet, after confiding in him.

  So they walked over to the grand avenue overlooking the Moskva River and stared into the opalescent dusk. The air was thick with the last of the hot summer day and swallows circled high above them. ‘It’s beautiful out here,’ said Misha, looking down at the river and the handful of pedestrians that hurried along Kremlyovskaya. In the misty gloom you could barely see the buildings along Sofiyskaya on the opposite bank of the Moscow River.

  For a moment or two they stood side by side, almost touching. Misha thought of Valya’s teasing and hoped Svetlana didn’t take a fancy to him. He was beginning to like her but having her as a girlfriend would be like going out with a scorpion. He reassured himself that he was too much of a lightweight for the daughter of the Vozhd.

  The undulating mechanical wail of the air-raid siren cut through the dusk. ‘They’re early tonight,’ she said calmly.

  Misha and Svetlana watched a crowd of officials and secretaries heading for the newly built shelters in the squares and gardens of the Kremlin. They all walked at a steady pace to their allotted shelters, no one looked too concerned. After all, sometimes the sirens went off and nothing happened. He wondered whether he ought to escort Svetlana to her own shelter or wait for her to dismiss him.

  But then they heard the faint buzz of aeroplane engines, swiftly blotted out by the steady thud of anti-aircraft guns. The Germans were here already.

  ‘They’ve sneaked through in the fog,’ said Misha, trying to keep the fear from his voice. The shelter the Petrovs had been allocated was close to the north wall. The first bombs were beginning to fall – a regular crump crump CRUMP – as the planes discharged their loads in rapidly approaching detonations. Sometimes there was just that single chain of explosions. Often the sound of crumbling masonry followed on.

  The last explosion was close enough for them all to see the flash, and from the corner of his eye Misha saw black fragments hurling through the air. Svetlana grabbed him by the arm. ‘Come to my shelter,’ she said. ‘It’s nearer.’

  All at once they were running, like everyone around them. Stalin and his cohorts had their own place of safety, newly dug just outside the Little Corner, close to the Vozhd’s own apartment and office. The two soldiers guarding the stairway entrance let Svetlana and her guest past without a word.

  Misha noticed immediately that this was a different class of shelter. There was a crowd of excited, anxious people, but there were nowhere near as many as packed into the other Kremlin shelters. In place of the usual whitewashed concrete walls, and the faint smell of damp earth and human waste, there was a polished woody smell from dark panels and varnished parquet flooring. Immediately to the right of a large steel door he could see an operations room, just like the one in the Little Corner which he had helped Papa clear up after meetings, with the same map on the wall, and portraits of Lenin and Stalin.

  The steel door clanged shut, and Misha wondered about the two guards, there on the other side. A loud explosion broke overhead and the lights momentarily flickered. People held their breath and Misha could see the tension on their faces. He felt perfectly safe – far safer than usual. He was sure Stalin’s own shelter was deeper and altogether better than everyone else’s.

  Close to the operations room was a dining room with a long table set with a lace cloth and crystal glasses. There were other rooms too, either side of the long corridor, with closed doors. Misha and Svetlana hurried down to the large room at the end of the shelter. The room filled up rapidly and Misha looked around, recognising many of the Soviet leaders. Molotov was there, and Rokossovsky and Beria. Then all at once, he saw Stalin staring straight at him. The eyes bored into him, holding his gaze, even as the Vozhd drew on a cigarette, his face unsmiling. Misha wondered if this was what a mouse felt like just before it was swallowed by a snake. He seemed to be saying, ‘What are you doing here?’

  Stalin broke off his staring and leaned towards a large burly man and whispered in his ear.

  ‘Svetlana, do you think we should tell your papa that you asked me to come down here with you?’

  ‘Don’t be silly, Comrade Mikhail,’ she hissed. ‘Why should I bother Papa with insignificant tattle like that?’

  The assistant was walking towards Misha with a purposeful, frankly hostile look on his face.

  There was a deep and ominous rumble. The ground shook. Everyone stopped talking. Then the lights went and everything was pitch black. ‘Comrades, please stand where you are and stay silent. The lights will return in a moment,’ said a commanding voice Misha didn’t recognise.

  In the dark Misha felt a hand clutch his. He was sure it was Svetlana.

  More explosions followed, including one close enough to dislodge earth and plaster and cause a few people to start coughing. Misha felt horribly vulnerable there in the dark and squeezed the hand that held his.

  After an eternity, the lights flickered back on and people began to move out into the corridor. As Misha’s eyes adjusted to the brightness, he realised Svetlana was no longer by his side. The sirens began to wail again – the steady all-clear signal this time.

  He was anxious to leave, before the angry-looking man found him, and he shuffled out with the others streaming to the staircase exit, careful to keep his eyes to the floor. Outside, the first thing Misha noticed was the smell of burning, then that gas and sewage smell that always accompanied an air raid. Over by the north side of the Kremlin he could see flames rising above the rooftops, and the taste of water vapour from firemen’s hoses mingled with the Moscow summer evening. Misha ran towards the fire.

  ‘Go back,’ said a guard as he neared the flames. ‘One of the shelters has had a direct hit.’ He was relieved to see it wasn’t the one Valya and his papa used.

  Misha dodged an ambulance as it swerved up the central square and walked in a daze to the great road in front of the cathedrals to look south over Moscow. Although there was a total blackout in force, the city was peppered with fires. He thought about what Valya had said about who would still be alive when the war was over and a cold shiver passed through him. Sirens and alarm bells from ambulances and fire engines brought him back to the present and Misha remembered immediately that he should go off to his own Komsomol air-raid detachment to see what he could do to help.

  Chapter 15

  Early September 1941

  August passed in a haze of air-raid sirens, Nazi bombs falling on the city and a procession of further dreadful news from the front. Now, whenever his friends met, he would hear of casualties. Nikolay had lost a cousin. Yelena had an uncle who had been killed near Orsha. He and Papa waited for news from Viktor and Elena, but there was only an ominous silence.

  When Misha crossed the great bridge, he noticed work had started again on the Great Palace of the Soviets on the embankment. They had been building it for years on and off, and he had heard rumours that the foundations were not strong enough to support its huge size. But now it was going down rather than up. You could hear them on the site around the clock. The papers reported the steel girders used to build it were being turned into tank traps.

  By the time Misha returned to school in early September, the German army seemed unstoppable. In the far north, the great city of Leningrad was surrounded. Down in the south, they had reached the Black Sea and it could only be a matter of days before the Crimea was occupied. Krasnograd and Novgorod had fallen. A mere two hundred kilometres lay between the Nazis and Moscow. As Nikolay had pointed out, rather alarmingly, it was a distance a fast car could cover in a couple of hours. Misha had realised how dangerous the situation was when he’d heard Kapitan Zhiglov had sent his daughter Galina to Kuybyshev, far off to the east. Lydia the maid had gone too. There was some natural justice in that. She had to put up with a difficult child, but at least she would be safe too.

  Misha had also heard an extraordinary rumour about Stalin’s eldest son, Y
akov. He had been captured in the fighting around Smolensk and the Vozhd had had his wife and children arrested. Misha’s mama had been friends with Yakov’s wife, Yulia, and he remembered her a little. When he mentioned it to his papa, Yegor Petrov looked merely uneasy, rather than shocked. ‘It’s a standard procedure when a soldier surrenders. The Vozhd has to be seen to be fair.’

  Misha shook his head in disbelief.

  On the first day back in school, Misha’s year were all assembled for a special extraordinary meeting. Misha sat with Nikolay and Sergey and was pleased when Yelena chose a seat as far away from him as possible on the other side of the hall. As he looked around, he noticed how many of his fellow pupils were looking unwell. Even twelve weeks into the war many had clothes that were starting to look too big for their bodies and the wan, malnourished look of street beggars. Clearly, rations for the general population were not as generous as they were in the Kremlin. He wondered if anyone would notice he wasn’t looking any thinner.

  ‘What’s this meeting about, d’you think?’ asked Nikolay.

  ‘Probably some information on air-raid drills and other wartime procedures,’ said Misha. He was starting to feel restless when Leonid Gribkov walked in and called the hall to order.

  ‘Why’s the Komsorg doing this and not Barikada?’ whispered Nikolay. Barikada usually led the school meetings and they had both seen him in class, but he had seemed unusually quiet. ‘I thought he’d be loving this,’ said Nikolay. ‘His chance to shine.’

  Gribkov did indeed go through the air-raid precautions, and who was to muster where in the event of an attack. A series of names were read out, including Misha’s, who was to act as air-raid warden and who was to take a register after an attack. He also reminded them all that the war office was still recruiting volunteers to defend Moscow and to go into the occupied areas as partisans. It was not compulsory to do so, unless you were eighteen years old, but his clear inference was that younger volunteers would not be turned away.

  Then he called for volunteers among the older students to replace teachers who had gone to fight. Misha caught Yelena’s eye when Gribkov asked for a show of hands, and she had raised hers too. She smiled and gave him a thumbs-up.

  Then Gribkov turned more serious than usual. He began to talk in the kind of political clichés that made most of the students gaze into thin air, about the pre-Revolutionary bourgeoisie – the factory owners and the landowners – and how they had tried to ‘throttle the Revolution with the bony hand of hunger’ and how even after their final defeat they had carried on sabotaging Soviet industry. He announced it was time once again to ‘tear off the mask of the enemies of the people’. Misha wondered where on earth this was going and worried that he was about to be denounced. But then Gribkov turned and pointed directly at Yelena, and called her ‘a wolf in sheep’s clothing’.

  Misha remembered what Valya had said about not being able to walk by when someone needed help. Amid the catcalls and boos directed at her he stood up and cried out, ‘Yelena Rozhkov is an exemplary communist and works directly for the good of all Moscow people. I have known her for many years and have heard her speak nothing but good of Comrade Stalin and the Soviet Union.’

  The room fell silent. Gribkov scoffed. ‘Comrade Petrov, we know you and Rozhkov have an intimate relationship, and you are acting out of kindness. You do not know the facts I now have before me and you would be well advised to remain silent.’ He was on a roll now, scenting blood, and he twisted the knife further. ‘Your attitude is incorrect, especially for a member of the Komsomol. You should not be showing pity to the daughter of enemies of the people.’

  Gribkov boldly announced that Yelena’s parents had been factory owners in Kharkov before the Revolution and were exploiters of the toiling classes. It had also been discovered that three of her cousins, who had fled after the Revolution, now lived in Berlin and, it was assumed, were directly assisting the Hitlerites in their war of subjugation.

  ‘Yelena Rozhkov, you are a non-person,’ he announced. ‘You are denied further education. Never return to this school.’

  Yelena ran from the hall in tears, dodging the fists of some of the bolder students and Misha and Nikolay deliberately stood in the way of some who were rushing over with cruel animal glee to land a blow on her. Then they tried to find her but she had fled.

  Misha had barely given a moment’s thought to non-people before his mama had been arrested, and he was ashamed now that he had felt no more than a momentary flicker of pity. His earlier school days had been full of occasions where a girl or a boy was made to stand in front of the whole school and have their Pioneer scarf snatched away from them because they had been unmasked as the offspring of a ‘non-toiling element’. Then the child, often bewildered and sobbing in shame, would be expelled from the school.

  He’d sometimes see them later, hollow-eyed and begging in the street, the son or daughter of a former priest or noble or factory owner. He’d see a parent he recognised from the school gates cleaning a public lavatory, with that same haunted look. None of his schoolmates ever stopped to talk to these non-people, even if they’d been friends with them in the past. He and his comrades at school had all agreed that these factory owners had done the same thing to the ordinary workers before the Revolution. The rich and powerful had treated the people with scorn, and now they were only receiving natural justice for centuries of repression.

  He burned with shame to think how easily he had accepted these unmaskings. Especially now that he was keenly aware that only his father’s position in the Kremlin had stopped the same thing happening to him. When Mama went, her arrest had been kept quiet. Misha had told his schoolmates his mother had fallen ill and had been taken to a sanatorium on the banks of the Caspian Sea.

  The next Rest Day, Misha went to Yelena’s home. Nikolay and Valya had wanted to come with him but he had persuaded them to let him go alone. It made no sense to put all their futures at risk.

  The Rozhkovs lived in a small apartment near his Grandma Olya. Her parents were quite elderly and worked at the office of the People’s Commissariat of Heavy Industry. They were ‘prominent people’, although Misha was sure they would now both have lost their jobs. He knocked on the door and was half surprised to hear movement behind it. A frightened voice called out, ‘Who is it?’

  Yelena’s mother pulled back the door a crack. She looked as though she had been crying. ‘You are lucky to find us, Mikhail,’ she said, opening the door to let him in. ‘We have to move out in two days, to a kommunalka in the Sokolnichesky district.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Misha. ‘Can I help you with your packing?’

  ‘Anton, he wants to help with our packing,’ she cried out to her husband, suppressing a hysterical laugh. ‘Mikhail, we can only bring one suitcase each.’

  Misha looked around the apartment aghast. It was comfortably furnished and full of books and ornaments and paintings. They would have to leave behind almost everything they owned.

  ‘I just wanted to tell Yelena how sorry I am that this has happened and that I wanted her to keep in touch,’ Misha said.

  Yelena’s father had come to join them. ‘She always had a soft spot for you, Mikhail, and that is a very touching gesture. I wish you could tell her that. I wish I could too . . .’ He clenched his jaw as he fought back his emotions. ‘She has gone to fight with the partisans. She told us if she did that, then nobody would be able to accuse her of being an enemy of the people.’

  Misha felt as if he had been kicked in the stomach. He told the Rozhkovs how sorry he was that this had happened to them, then he left. He managed to walk two streets before he had to sit down in a doorway and fight back his tears.

  After the terrible first day, it was a relief to be back at school. The routine kept Misha occupied. He was pleased to discover that Valya would also be coming into school a couple of times a week to teach physics to the younger classes while she awaited her call-up to the air force.

  Misha had also volunteer
ed to teach literature to the younger ones, but he found that far more difficult than his classes with the factory workers. The children were too restless and could not understand why they should take an interest in Chekhov and the comings and goings of nineteenth-century aristocrats and merchants.

  ‘Forget the Chekhov,’ Sergey told him. ‘You should try Tolstoy. War and Peace – Napoleon’s invasion and what happened to his army. That’ll make them sit up and take notice.’

  In the next lesson Misha read them an extract depicting Napoleon’s disastrous retreat through the Russian winter.

  ‘And that is how we shall defeat the Hitlerites!’ Misha announced triumphantly. The class cheered. This was what they wanted to hear and from then on he had their full attention.

  After class, he hurried to the school canteen, keen to share his success with his friends, although his heart sank a little at the thought of what there would be to eat. Having spent the summer enjoying the usual provisions of the Kremlin elite, Misha had been particularly shocked by the sudden decline in quality of the school meals. They had always been bland but but now they were almost inedible. On his first day back there was a thin gruel for lunch that was barely more than hot water with potato peelings in it, and a few other unidentifiable vegetables. He thought longingly of the beautiful chicken soup his mother used to cook, with its tender meat, and sliced carrots, always cut on the horizontal – ‘They look nicer that way,’ she used to say, – and a good sprinkling of dill in the delicious salty broth.

  Today’s lunch was probably the vilest thing Misha had eaten that year. The meat was almost entirely gristle.

  ‘What’s this?’ said Nikolay. ‘Lizards’ gizzards?’

  They all laughed quietly at that. The potatoes were full of black spots and the cabbage was stone cold. Worst of all was the gravy – a lukewarm glutinous paste which had traces of skin on top that reminded Misha of flaking brown paint on a damp wall.